And if so, it’s completely undermining your training and any results you’re hoping to see.

From an aesthetic PoV, the way you eat has the profound power to elevate training performance, enhance recovery, accelerate fat loss, and catalyze muscle growth. It’s like a moving airport walkway or a high-powered fan — it accentuates your habits and propels everythingforward, faster.

Effectively, when your diet is a disaster, the hard work you do put in barely keeps your body afloat. And if that effort slips whatsoever—and it will, once you inevitably lose your motivation from a lack of results—your body fat is bound to skyrocket and your physique will spontaneously combust.

To help revamp your “diet” (read: your pattern of eating) we’ve concocted the de facto Lean It UP Clean Eating Manifesto. It’s an insanely simple, straightforward, nutritional blueprint that’s designed to help streamline HOW you eat and actively build a killer physique; in a way that’s highly flexible, SUSTAINABLE long term, and not a royal pain in the ass.

Think of it as the 10 Commandments of eating, except that we beefed it up to 17 essential rules.

Follow it and not only will you build muscle tone, drop body fat, and keep it low—gasp, you might even see a few abs blossom—but you’ll gradually construct a body that’s glowing from the inside-out, immune from disease, bubbling with energy, and designed to stay strong in the long run.

Don’t call it a diet. I absolutely hate that word — it implies that you’re following a temporary eating pattern. Call it a lifestyle. This is how you’re living. And it starts right now.

17 Nutrition Tactics To Eat Cleaner, Live Leaner, And Build The Ultimate Body

You’re busy and we won’t bullshit you. Our rulebook is completely free of gimmicks and trivialities, as we’ve stripped it down to the bare essentials that are tried and tested to work effectively.

Eating healthy and effectively really isn’t that hard. It just takes a little discipline and a slight recalibration.

Ready? Start with #1.

1. KNOW Your Calories.

Calories matter. You just don’t have to count them.

At the foundation of any diet—regardless of what goes in—engorging yourself with food will lead to weight gain, and eating an all-celery diet will lead to weight loss. It’s energy balance, and those core principles almost always hold. But nutrition is highly sophisticated — the QUALITY of weight gain/loss (i.e. muscle, fat, water) will vary immensely depending on a spectrum of factors.

Your move: use your personal calories as a guideline.

Knowing a rough estimate of your body’s caloric maintenance gives you a frame of reference to work with, and a number to shoot for. That ballpark helps keep your eating in check — and immediately magnifies the impact of a 1,800 calorie Sonic Blast.

To get there, follow two easy steps:

(1)Calculate your maintenance calories. Use this calculator, pop in your information, and it’ll spit out a number. That’s a rough approximate of how much you should be eating based on your metabolism and activity levels.

Plus, food labels are notoriously inaccurate. By law, labeled calorie counts are allowed to exceed labels by up to 20%. TWENTY. One study in the Journal of The American Dietetic Association found that calorie counts on packaged foods exceeded labels by 8%, and those on restaurant menus by a whopping 18%.2345

Over time you’ll develop nutrient deficiencies, inflammation, and degenerative diseases. Blood sugar levels chronically spiral, which (A) triggers fat storage and (B) leads to insulin resistance and diabetes. Eventually, the body forgets how to use stored fat as fuel, as it becomes overly reliant on glucose — that equates to early fatigue, horrible CV fitness, and the inability to burn off body fat.

But once you cut out all of the garbage—and replace it with whole, fresh, nutrient-dense powerhouses—your body gradually refreshes itself, resets its hormones, and re-learns to function as it was designed.

Additionally, you’ll be able to rely on automatic cues to regulate hunger. Americans are hungry ALL THE TIME because of what they eat. Protein, healthy fats, veggies, and complex carbs all boost satiety and work in concert to produce a feeling of fullness.